


Father and Son

by Valmouth



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan)
Genre: Character Death, Fate, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Old Friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-18
Updated: 2012-11-18
Packaged: 2017-11-18 23:21:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/566416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valmouth/pseuds/Valmouth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gordon wants to say it’s all going to be okay but it isn’t. And Damian isn’t the child who needs that from him. That child grew up many years ago, and died last night, giving everything he had to make those words come true.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Father and Son

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I own no rights to these characters, or to the originals works and creative universe they're derived from. I mean no offence by posting this and make no money from it.
> 
> A/N: This is my take on the Nolanverse, and is very OOC for most incarnations of the Bat family characterisation.

Gordon is old when it happens, but he rises from his chair and ventures out into the big, bad world.

Fifty years ago, he thinks, he’d hoped that time and money would heal Gotham. Forty years ago, he’d hoped Gotham would heal itself. Twenty years ago, well, the Batman had come to Gotham. His beliefs had changed.

And now? Now the Batman is dead. And Gotham is worse than it’s ever been. It is darker, meaner. It’s crimes are no longer petty and careless, but evil and sadistic. Survival of the fittest has made its criminals the worst the country can offer.

And some of that is the Batman’s fault.

Gordon doesn’t keep a car these days. He rarely leaves his apartment. The public doesn’t remember the hero Commissioner who retired six years ago with only one arm and failing eyesight. Under the circumstances, the taxi is an expense he can’t really afford.

And he is proud of that. Proud that he has never accepted anything from anyone; has taken his wage, but only when he earned it. He never took the taste.

He straightens when he gets into the back of the taxi. Stares out of the window.

He won’t attend the funeral. He won’t be expected to.

Bruce Wayne will be buried for the third time and Gordon can almost see the snide comments on the internet, on breakfast chat shows and in the smaller magazines that still sell. All those questions of whether this time it’s real, or whether it’s just another disappearing trick. Whether it’s just another cowardly attempt to run away.

Gordon is used to the snide comments. He also knows the truth. He’s seen the Batman stand his ground against things no one should. He’s seen the Batman take a bullet and still keep going. Take a knife wound and still keep fighting.

He’s seen Batman, beaten and hurt and emotionally scarred, push himself off the ground and stand to face an enemy he knows he cannot beat. Take more punishment in a fight he wages himself, because no one else has been able to take that burden from him.

Forty years ago, Gordon thinks wistfully, and he might have.

Forty years ago and he had wanted to, catching sight of the child sitting in the dingy police station, grieving and traumatised, clutching his father’s jacket with mute, terrified fear that this too would be taken from him.

The man was not the boy, though Gordon knows all about how trajectories can be traced. Cause and effect. The face he knows will rot six feet underground and it will not rise again. Will be still and devoid of life; ironically mask-like now that there is no need for the masks.

The drive is long. An hour at best, and Gordon pats his pockets awkwardly for the cash he prefers to keep on hand. His wallet is empty when he’s done and there’s barely anything left over for a decent tip, but the cab driver shrugs. And smiles.

It’s unexpected.

Wayne Manor is silent in mid-afternoon, sprawling expanse of grounds lazing in weak winter sunlight.

He remembers the outcry when Bruce reclaimed the family home on his return. Remembered the strain that descended between Bruce and John. Never mind that the orphans got a building closer to the city, closer to schools and public transport and emergency services. Never mind that the new grounds were just as big, and had courts for the kids to play on.

John runs the orphanage now. Gordon wonders how the extensions are going. The literacy classes. The trade training programs.

John, who is in love with Babs, who has said nothing because Babs loves Dick, who is too young and too broken and too haunted by the things Batman never protected him from. Exposed him to, in fact, with full knowledge of what it would do to an impressionable, grieving teenager. Dick, who might, Gordon suspects, choose to assume the heavy burden of the cowl because he feels he should, because he wants his guardian to be proud of him.

No matter what he wants for himself.

It’s Tim who opens the door.

Gordon doesn’t need to speak, merely enter.

Tim is quiet and reserved, even in his grief, and his eyes never stop calculating, never stop assessing. Unlike Bruce, who turned it off on those rare moments when he was at peace. Who could see people as more than their weaknesses, their tells. Tim’s mind is the closest to Bruce, and nothing like it at all.

Gordon has seen Bruce smile, genuine and small and completely committed, and he has seen Tim. Of the two, Tim is a shadow.

They all are.

Except one.

He isn’t here to see Tim, or Dick, or John. He’s not even there to see Cassandra, who may or may not have been involved in Bruce’s last encounter with the Joker.

He finds Damian in the Bat cave. As he expects.

The boy is still so young, barely fourteen, and he has only known his father two years.

Gordon walks in and he knows he isn’t the person Damian wants, or needs.

Inadvertently he thinks of Alfred, who might have been the only person who could have got through to the son of Bruce Wayne. But Bruce buried Alfred ten years ago and refused to replace him. Couldn’t replace him.

Alfred would have softened the boy’s edges, would have scolded him and put him down, laughed at him gently between twists of razor-sharp logic and the soft burr of an English accent. Who would have treated him like the child he was, and known how to balance it with the things he’d seen.

Gordon can’t do that.

He doesn’t know this boy, hasn’t met him above three times, but he knows Damian was important to Bruce, and he knows that Bruce was everything to Damian.

He knows, because when he looks at Damian, he sees the boy who sat in a police station forty years ago.

His heart breaks beneath the parallels. This isn’t Bruce, clutching a tuxedo jacket and freefalling into the end of the world. This is Damian, who sits in the chair in front of the monitors and watches the live feed of the death of Batman.

“He shouldn’t have gone for that shot,” Damian says.

The voice is cold, too adult, and it echoes slightly off the cave walls. Gordon feels the chill run down his spine.

The video rewinds and then freezes.

“There,” Damian says, pointing at the screen, “He shouldn’t have done that. His left knee was exposed.”

His left knee. The one made of fragile bone. The one Bruce had intended to replace with metal like the right, Dick making jokes about X-Men comics and Wolverine, and putting in laser beams or back-up missiles.

Gordon watches the footage of the Joker’s crowbar coming down just above the armour plating, just above the knee to shatter the already shattering joint. The immediate collapse of the Batman. Thinks of how much pain that incapacitating blow would have delivered.

His stomach turns but Damian merely lets the video play on.

It lasts for what feels like hours.

He sees the building come down, the last glimpse of the Batman beneath the falling rubble. The Joker disappears, vanishes. They’re looking for a body, according to the police officer who called him.

“Just a courtesy, sir. We know you two had a history.”

They’d been close. He’d seen Bruce only a week ago.

“I’m tired, Jim. Maybe I’ll take a break when this is over. Spend some time with Damian. There are some business projects I’ve been meaning to look at too.”

“A break means a rest, Bruce.”

“What would you do, if you were taking a break?”

He’s retired. All he does is sit at home and watch the news. Tidy up after himself. Sometimes he goes out; mostly he doesn’t.

Doesn’t need to. They come to him. John drops in, and Babs calls. Dick comes by every couple of weeks on a quiet patrol.

His apartment has a fire escape that can’t be seen from the street or the roof of the next building. Has an overhang to afford it some protection. His apartment has Wayne Tech security, Oracle’s systems feeding live through the panic sensors, and triage grade medical equipment. More superheroes come through his apartment than commuters at Grand Central.

The video ends and Damian reaches for the controls.

“How are you holding up?” Gordon asks.

The small hand hesitates. “I’m angry,” Damian says bluntly, “He was better than that.”

Gordon thinks of the lines in Bruce’s face, the threads of silver in his hair, the scars and bruises that never faded, the breaks that rarely got the time to heal completely before they were stressed and tested.

“He was,” he agreed.

“For some enemies, killing them is the only way to protect yourself,” Damian continues. His voice is almost expressionless. “Had my father killed the Joker many years ago, he would have saved himself, and all the other people the Joker killed.”

Gordon knows. He was there the night the Batman aimed his bike for the Joker. Was there the following night when the Joker tried to kill hundreds.

He thinks of Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes, who would have been martyrs. He thinks of Babs, aged six, curled into her mother’s side while her father lay on the ground and failed to save his family. His son, who had a gun pointed at his head and his hero taken away, all in one night.

A part of him wants to believe in Damian’s conviction but all of him believes in the Batman. _Believed_.

“If you kill, you become like them. And who gets to decide who’s worth killing and who’s not? Your father always hoped he could figure out how to stop the Joker without killing him. Maybe cure him.”

Damian’s hands fall to the controls again. And he punches buttons with a quiet intensity that is so familiar, so reassuring, Gordon wants to smile. Aches to see the familiar figure standing beside him, returning his amusement.

The files that fill the screen are encrypted but Damian hits something else and data starts running. Churning. Words and symbols and charts and lists of things move too fast for Gordon’s faded eyesight to make out.

It might as well be in Chinese.

“What is that?” he asks.

“All his research on the Joker,” Damian says, “Do you know what he found?”

Gordon has an idea, though he shakes his head anyway.

“Nothing,” Damian says, and doesn’t elaborate.

Gordon isn’t surprised.

“He should have killed him years ago,” Damian says.

And for the first time in the conversation, there is an emotion there. It’s an ugly petulance, filled with anger still childish and all-consuming.

Damian is violent. Gordon knows this. Bruce said nothing out of loyalty to his son but the only time Tim’s ever come to Gordon’s apartment was the night Damian tried to kill him. Cut his line, he said, and Gordon’s seen Robins in all stages of anger and uncertainty, but never shaken. Never so alone.

At the time, Tim had been a child too.

Gordon understands enough of what Damian is capable of, but he still stands there, and waits for the break.

When it comes it is appropriately silent. It isn’t an outburst, it isn’t a scream, it isn’t the sound of fists hitting delicate machinery.

It is internal, and all Gordon is given is a change in the air.

This too is like Bruce.

Like twenty years ago when Gordon would look out over the city from the rooftop of the old MCU building, and he’d feel the change in the air when the Batman arrived. The sudden crawl of anticipation and fizz of energy.

This isn’t energy or anticipation. It is sadness. Lost, calm, wondering sadness.

Because in the end, Damian is just a child. He didn’t really know his father but he’d longed for him, and Bruce had loved him with the depth of intensity only he was capable of.

Gordon doesn’t try to touch Damian. Knows better than to think it will be appreciated.

But when he looks down he sees something that makes his throat close, makes his eyes sting.

He’s not entirely sure until he picks it up. Shakes it out one handed and wishes fiercely for his other arm. Wishes he’d never been so pigheaded as to refuse the prosthetic, no matter how uncomfortable. Wishes his eyesight was better and his body was younger.

Wishes it was twenty years ago.

But it isn’t.

The cape is an old one and the cloth is worn. He’s never felt the texture against his fingertips and he’s surprised by how light it really is.

Damian’s head is bowed forward and Gordon knows what he will find if he looks into that face.

More misery. More heartbreak.

He does it anyway. Because someone needs to, and Bruce isn’t here to do it himself.

He draws the cape carefully over those small, muscular shoulders. Reaches out tentatively and touches the young cheek.

He wants to say it’s all going to be okay but it isn’t. And Damian isn’t the child who needs that from him. That child grew up many years ago, and died last night, giving everything he had to make those words come true.

Damian’s eyes are hazel, and beneath the childhood roundness Gordon can already see the narrow bones of his face, the angles and planes of adulthood. The shadows.

“He loved you,” he says.

And that’s all he needs to say.

Damian doesn’t cry, as his father before him didn’t. Gordon doesn’t even know if the words register.

Seconds later – hours, minutes? – Dick walks in. Takes in the scene with a keen eye and his long strides eat up the distance. His hand drops to Damian’s shoulder but Gordon notices, because he can, that the fingers tremble against the texture of the cape.

“Hey, buddy. We’ve been looking for you. Commissioner.”

“Dick,” Gordon says.

They don’t share their grief. Not then.

Dick looks haunted, but he stands as if he’s made his decision and Gordon already knows what it will be.

The Batman will continue to meet with him, just for old time’s sake, and he will have the cowl and cape continue to cast their shadows across his floor. He will ask questions that will be deflected, get answers in words that are blunt and to the point, in a voice that will rasp and growl beneath its disguise.

The eyes, though, the eyes will be blue. The mouth too full, the jaw too square. The skin tone a touch darker and the stature a little too short. Body slender. Lithe. Fighting style different.

One day, he’ll die too. And maybe the Batman will visit his daughter. He doesn’t know.

John and Dick and Barbara have been something he could never understand. Bruce had never tried.

“Love isn’t my area of expertise,” Gordon remembers Bruce saying.

He looks down at Damian staring up at the meticulous files on the Joker, at this proof that Bruce had wanted to save every last person he could, no matter how hopeless, and he steps back.

There is no Loeb to chase him away. This time he does it of his own volition; there will be no future meeting this time. No messages carried through the years. When he leaves the manor, there aren’t reporters baying for the child he walks away from. Things are different.

Tim appears before he can reach awkwardly for his cell phone.

“I’ll drive you back, Commissioner,” he says, keys in hand.

“You lot do remember I retired, right?”

Tim smiles. It’s small and bleak but it’s one of the rare times it’s affectionate. “Mr. Gordon, that’s what he always called you. He said you earned the title, whether the City paid you for it or not.”

Gordon, like Damian, doesn’t cry. But he looks up at the sky and nods. Once.

“Come on,” he says gruffly, and walks to the car.  


End file.
